


It's still pleasure, even without the guilt.

by Zenolalia



Series: Kinktober 2019 [2]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Female Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Kinktober 2019, M/M, Male Solo, Masturbation, Masturbation in Shower, Monk Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Podfic Welcome, Semi-Public Sex, Showers, Translation Welcome, Unnamed Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-22 05:01:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20868599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zenolalia/pseuds/Zenolalia
Summary: Alphinaud refuses to do anything untoward in the very public and frankly humiliating showers of the Eulmoran citizenship offices. Unfortunately, this does not work out in his favour.





	It's still pleasure, even without the guilt.

Eulmore was as intensely off-putting as Alphinaud had expected it to be. The whiplash of walking through the slums outside the walls and entering the tower city's immigration process was enough to put anyone on edge.

Or, anyone other than the impossibly stoic warrior who accompanied him.

The contrast of his filthy foraging clothes and the vibrant tapestries and immaculate floors were also not lost on him. As a child, he had moved through such luxuries without a second thought, and even after the calamity, they were not wholly foreign to him. But, years of war on the source had made him less and less at ease with shows of frivolous wealth. And, this world was dying. The time for gilt walls had ended a century ago.

He hadn't eaten anything in a day and a half, but still, his stomach curdled as they drifted from bureaucrat to bureaucrat. The similarity between to tedious errands they went on together here, and the ones he had sent the warrior on alone in the past, added to the itchy sensation that he had failed something critical, even as his plan fell perfectly into place.

And then the officer who should have been delivering them to their final goal was instead handing them perfumes. Perfumes! Surrounded by starveling masses just beyond these walls, in a world a hair's breadth from destruction, and yet there was gold, marble, silk, and even perfume within Eulmore's tower.

It left him twitchy. Far more so than accusations of squalor, labour and lice had done. The cut crystal bottle sat heavy in his hands.

He made some over-strained joke, and the warrior stared at him with the subtlest expression of concern before plunging ahead towards the so-called “delousery.” He trailed in the warrior’s wake, studying the bottle, the walls, the floors. He tried to summon up outrage to choke out the overwhelming sensation of being at death’s door and being told to strip—to disarm—before the end came. 

Ever the first into battle, the warrior had no such concerns. But then, when she could put her fist through the side of a god with little effort, leaving her clothes and weapons unguarded in an unlocked room while she bathed was not much of a concern. 

He was still tarrying even as she finished, pointedly drenching herself in an extract of rose barely a yalm away from him. The suffocating smell didn’t help.

“It seems rather. Exposed. For one's ablutions, doesn’t it?” He refused to acknowledge any wavering in his voice. 

Unimpressed, the Warrior stared down at him. “What would Estinien say, to see you cowering like this, hmm?”

“Good gods!” Alphinaud barely avoided dropping the perfume entirely. It had been months since even Alisaie had given up haranguing him about a man who, for all intents and purposes, was dead to him, trapped on the other side of an impassable barrier between realities. But then, it had only been a few weeks for the Warrior, not more than a year. He hadn’t been expecting that. Wasn’t ready for it at all, especially when tables had so thoroughly turned in light of Alisaie’s innkeeper. His strangled reaction was condemnation enough, too, and unlike Alisaie, the warrior might have means of passing along this humiliation as gossip. Not that she would, but, “You will mention nothing of this! Swear to me!”

She laughed at his request and gestured broadly to the showers. “I might be persuaded, by someone cleaner than yourself.”

He rightly sprinted into the shower. 

As with the rest of the towering city, the showers were excruciatingly lush. Surrounded by white roses, curtained by violet tapestries enchanted not to rot in the wet. It smelled of perfumed soaps, and the water was on the very edge of too hot. It reminded him of the hot springs of Kugane, an endless stream of clean, hot water and a mass of public bathers. Though, this time at least there were the curtains. 

The stall itself was clearly built with galdjent and ronso in mind, leaving an under-sized elf with more than enough space to move freely.

The anxiety of being trapped naked in enemy territory abated slowly, under the steady thrall of the hot water and the ebbing humiliation of having his now years old feelings for a dragoon who had never so much as bothered to meet his eyes thrown in his face. He was an adult, of course, much like everyone around him. But, the miniature stature that came of having shared formative space in the womb with an entire other person caused no one to actually recognize that. 

Certainly not any Ishgardian warriors of ill repute who towered some two fulms over him. 

He scrubbed at the unfortunate film of dirt and sweat that had slunk beneath his gathering gear, watching his skin turn red beneath the assault of heat and soap. He studiously ignored the amount of dust in his hair that had managed to turn the suds pale brown as he scrubbed his fingers through his scalp. If he found a twig complete with two leaves snarled in the length of his hair, clearly having been caught in his braid, he certainly made no note of it and didn’t let it tangle his belly with hot shame. 

He also ignored the much more unfortunate heat building between his hips. It was a natural reaction to the combination of the animal pleasure of cleanliness and the wholly unexpected reminder of bruise ringed eyes, chapped lips, a war won at the cost of so many friends, the refusal to lose another. 

It had been years, and he was not a startled child trying not to wake someone sleeping across the floor of a too-small tent, ilms out of reach of his dreaming hands. 

In short, he was not going to relieve himself of that particular ache in a bleeding shower in the heart of a madman’s stronghold, no matter how much the slow release of knots in his back beneath the torrent of hot water suggested he not only could but would find it an unbearably pleasant diversion from the rest of this situation.

He had outgrown the need to bring himself off in the moments of quiet between danger and death.

He was so focused on not being that childish, as he scrubbed with adolescent fervour at the joint of his thigh and hip, that he didn’t even notice the risk of such vigorous movements to his ultimate goal. Until the back of his wrist dragged against his prick on one wayward stroke. 

It occurred to him then, in the illusory safety of a not-truly-private shower, covered in slick suds and finally free of the encroaching filth of sweat and dirt that he had grown accustomed to in his long studies of the Eulmoran slums, that he was well and truly fucked. 

And that, even a year and a half since he had so much as heard a rumour of Estinien’s whereabouts, his damned fool subconscious had found no one else to latch onto, because he well and truly wanted Estinien to be the one doing the fucking. Or being fucked. Or watching him as he fucked his own hands. Dear gods there were a great many things that he would give every fraction of a gil to his name, in both these worlds, to simply watch Estinien do, let alone be watched by, touched in turn. 

Instead, Alphinaud watched his own pale fingers wrap around his prick, and imagined they were far longer. Estinien was brusque at the best of times, no doubt some part of him would see this as just another task on an eternal list. Alphinaud set for himself a brutal pace, far more aggressive than he had grown accustomed to in moments of genuine reprieve, without the rush of fantasy pushing at him. 

He bit furiously at his own lips, gagging back any sound that might have dared to cross them, and turned his face into the stream of the shower, eyes shut, staring up at the imagined face of a man so much taller than himself, framed by hair weighed down by the wet, spread across his broad, broad shoulders. He imagined the rivulets trailing down Estinien’s arms, dripping across Estinien’s fingers, pooling in the places where their skin met. 

He wished, fervently, that his imagination were strong enough to let him forget that it was his own hand. He wished he wasn’t counting the seconds of this illicit reprieve. He wished he could lose himself in it completely, instead of having a corner of his mind dedicated to keeping him quiet, keeping him quick, so that no one would catch him or realize he had taken too long. 

He didn’t dare imagine Estinien curling down to meet his lips, to risk drowning him as the shower poured on. He dared not imagine the current tangling their hair together as they shared breaths. But he let himself imagine this much: Estinien’s hands, one holding him steady at the hip, one trying to drag the orgasm out of him by force. Estinien’s too-agile legs folding, steady as steel even in the slick, soapy puddle of the shower’s floor. Estinien’s thin lips stretched into a narrow smile, an ilm away from the aching head of Alphinaud’s cock. His deep, smoking voice. “Come now, lad, you’ve never been patient before.” Estinien’s mouth just capturing the tip of Alphinaud’s cock as he came, as though the shower wouldn’t have washed away the evidence anyway. 

Alphinaud stood, alone, naked, in the middle of a madman’s stronghold, and waited for the shame and regret to come, so that he might swallow them down before tremoring him way back to the waiting warrior, and up to the mysterious Chais who, as far as this broken city was concerned, owned his life. 

But, all that met his patience was the sound of pouring water. The vague splashes of other bathers in other stalls. No rancid guilt, no sudden demand for him to hurry up from the warrior.

He made a last pass over his hair—once the pride of his aesthetic—with the soap and felt more guilt for that than for bringing himself off in a public shower to the thought of a man whom he would probably never meet again. He slunk back into his clothes and was acutely aware of their dirtiness in comparison to his own clean skin.

Eulmore was a city of rotting contrasts, and he supposed it was fitting that he was, too. That the shower had washed him clean just so he could wrap himself in filth again. 

He left the delousery, and with a reminding glance from the warrior, covered himself in cloying perfume. His was lily, where she still stood in a cloud of rose. 

“I believe the lingering smells of the road have been successfully expunged!” He declared, and this time, he took the lead, leaving the warrior in his own wake.

**Author's Note:**

> [SpicyRecipeh's Kinktober 2019 list.](https://mobile.twitter.com/spicyrecipehs/status/1168390597738188801) Day two: Baths or Showers.


End file.
